Best-selling late 17th-early 18th-century English playwright William Congreve hit the curative psychological nail on the head when he observed: “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast.”
Indeed, it undoubtedly does, but there are plenty more benefits to be had from quality, adventurous, and alluring sonic wares.
All that and class entertainment are on offer at this year’s Voice of Music Festival, the 41st edition, taking place at the Pastoral Hotel at Kfar Blum, in the far northern reaches of this battered and beautiful country, October 28-November 1.
As anyone who has attended the annual classical music event there in the past surely knows, holding a festival in such pleasant surroundings enhances the aural experience, complementing the onstage mix with other sensory pleasures.
There is more of that in the offing. The folks over at the hotel have been hosting the festivalgoers and artists in style for some time now and, more recently, have been expanding the facilities and upgrading the aesthetic backdrop so that the event is now a fully in-house spread that is just as pleasing on the eye as on the ear.
They have added an all-purpose concert auditorium building and are now investing in beautifying the commodious grounds, betwixt the sprawling lawns dotted with shade-giving trees.
And that’s even without noting the peerless majesty of the Golan Heights and steepling Mount Hermon seemingly – even without pre-winter whitecap – but a stone’s throw away to the east.
Hotel deputy CEO Michal Moraly took me for a guided tour of a place I have come to know well over the past two-plus decades of popping up North for the music-based cultural weekends and the music festival.
They do say that familiarity can breed contempt, suggesting that one can become inured to charms encountered too often; but in all this time, my enjoyment of the accommodation and facilities offered by the Pastoral Hotel has dimmed nary a jot. There is nothing formulaic about the rooms and suites, housed in Italian-style, two-story buildings around the grounds.
Now the hotel plans to up the Tuscany ambiance ante by some deft design reimagining, such as the installation of ponds complete with goldfish and lilies, and an aqueduct to add the sound of gurgling water to the twittering of birds, and a soundtrack of pop and folk favorites gently piped through speakers at various vantage points.
The renovation and refurbishment program also includes constructing a large swimming pool, shaped to follow the contours of a grand piano, and relocating the gym from the basement of the spa wing of the main building to an upper floor overlooking the pool.
The current gym will be turned into an activity space for kids, as the hotel aims to bring more families and younger folk into its consumer catchment reach.
Keeping cool in Kfar Blum
The Voice of Music Festival traditionally takes place in the summer, when the thermometer mercury level is high and even short walks between the comfortable air-conditioned concert halls and your accommodation or the dining room can get the sweat glands working overtime.
The forthcoming edition was shifted down the calendar due to yet another round of regional altercation, which means that the festivalgoers get to bask in gentler meteorological conditions betwixt the musical entertainment.
But even when the festival reverts to its regular July slot, the new pergolas, complete with climbing vegetation, fountains, and shaded benches should provide some respite from the summer heat.
Once again, veteran pianist-educator Dr. Ofra Yitzhaki serves as artistic director, and has put together a varied program that arches across manifold genres, eras, mindsets, and formats.
Over the years, open rehearsals have become a popular addition to the program, offering fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpses of what goes into the elbow-grease preliminaries for the staged end product.
Each of the first four days features a bunch of Open Rehearsal spots, both at the hotel Opera Hall and at the nearby Charles Clore Center, as ensemble players go through their paces while toiling on scores by the likes of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Ravel.
But Yitzhaki does not focus exclusively on the usual suspects. There are more contemporary works in the five-day agenda, such as by 20th-century American composer Samuel Barber, compatriot Florence Beatrice Price, Jewish Austrian-American modernist Arnold Schoenberg, and, coming bang up to date, contributions from 89-year-old Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov and 68-year-old Danish counterpart Bent Sorensen.
Yitzhaki says she tends to keep an open mind, ear, and heart when crafting her curatorial offerings.
“When I put together the festival program, I feel a threefold obligation: towards the audience, the musicians, and towards that abstract entity that is music,” she declares. “I want to provide the audience with a heart-lifting experience and give the musicians a repertoire that brings them joy and interest. But I feel it is also my job to care for culture.”
For Yitzhaki there is far more on the line than just giving the patrons a decent return for their hard-earned shekels.
“[I am duty bound] to preserve the gems through superb performances, generating cultural contexts that make it possible to gain a new and refreshing perspective, linking the music of the past and the music of the present, and to safeguard a place for local classical music so that art from here, from Israel, can progress and grow.”
Trumpeting homegrown composers
That is, indeed, a lofty, commendable aim, with the artistic director putting her money where her mouth is – for example, with the inclusion of the first airing of Piano Concerto No. 5 by Israeli composer Naama Perel-Tzadok, and the premiere of a definitively cross-cultural work by 28-year-old oud player-composer Onn Yosef Kadosh, Homage to Scarlatti for Flute, Harp and String Trio. The latter was commissioned by the festival with the support of the Israel Music Institute.
There is also a multidisciplinary aspect to the rollout, with Yitzhaki flexing her curatorial muscle to include a multifariously crafted production of Prokofiev’s perennially popular Peter and the Wolf.
The rendition at Kfar Blum will be spearheaded by the Tel Aviv Wind Quintet, with the polychromic performance taking in acting and movement under the directorial aegis of theater and opera performer, dancer, and sound and video artist Ari Teperberg.
Any onstage object is fair game for the artistic process, as junior audience members get a close earful and eyeful of the instruments doing their melodious thing.
With the classical world as a whole grappling with the ongoing challenge of aging audiences, the Culture and Sport Ministry-aided fivesome might just spark some youngster’s imagination and even inspire them to consider getting hands-on instrumental knowledge of their own.
At the very least, catching a live rendition of the Prokofiev work may induce a lasting interest in the classical music world, thereby nurturing future musical consumership.
Literature gets a vicarious look in, with Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), string sextet with Israel Philharmonic Orchestra violinist and concertmaster Nitzan Bartana and fellow IPO member cellist Linor Katz in the lineup.
Verklärte Nacht feeds off a poem of the same name by German poet-author Richard Dehmel. It is a romantically inclined chart in which the composer expresses his ardor for his then-future wife Mathilde Zemlinsky, who happened to be his teacher’s sister.
The Schoenberg work appears in a concert that goes by the tantalizing name of Kee Saarta Alai (For You Stormed Me), with the epexegetical addendum of “Love and Passion in Songs, Music and Texts.”
The title hails from a poem by feted Israel Prize laureate poet Natan Alterman, which some may recognize from pop-folk readings by Arik Einstein and Chava Alberstein put to music by iconic songstress Naomi Shemer.
The eponymous number features in the Hebrew Love Song Selection concert opener, with Yitzhaki accompanying vocalist-actress Ola Schur Selektar.
The October 31 (10:30 a.m.) performance concludes with Rachmaninoff’s Trio elégiaque No. 1 in G minor, with Katz in the thick of things here, too, along with violinist Natasha Sher and pianist Renana Gutman.
The overarching sensibility also comes through loud and strong in the October 31 (5 p.m.) concert by the Cecilia Octet vocal troupe, one of the few extramural events, at Domus Galilaeae.
The Christian meeting place, used primarily for seminars and conventions, sits atop the Mount of Beatitudes and commands a spectacular view of the Sea of Galilee from the north.
Another off-campus vignette, the Family Picnic vignette, takes place on the banks of the River Jordan with the high-spirited Jerusalem Street Orchestra, under baton-wielding founder Ido Shpitalnik, doing the sonorous honors.
The thinking behind the creation
As usual, Yitzhaki puts in an extra couple of dozen shifts over the five days, giving festivalgoers insights into the machinations behind the lives and scores of a broad sweep of creators.
She opens the Work in Focus three-parter on the second day of the festival, at 4 p.m., with a talk about 20th-century Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu and his 1992 work And Then I Knew ‘Twas The Wind.
That is followed, at the same time on the morrow, with a talk about Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag, who turned 100 in February.
The program includes renditions of excerpts of Kurtag charts by Yitzhaki, along with Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra flutist Rotem Bartan.
The series closer, on October 30 (5 p.m.), called Secrets from the Safe, sees Yitzhaki once again behind the piano keyboard, playing a broad selection of works, with some in-between verbal enlightenment about the featured music.
There is some local stuff-strutting in the Café Concert section, which has the Upper Galilee-based Classis Trio of cellist Oshri Shatil, French horn player Shir Farkash, and pianist Liri Dubin playing a selection of light classical works and Israeli songs.
The October 29 (5 p.m.) date also features some original material.
The previous day, Bartan joins the other members of the Rosemarin Ensemble, US-born violist Itamar Ringel and harpist Marina Fradin, in an adventurous program that takes in scores by 20th-century Israeli composer Marc Lavry, Bartok, Mozart, and genre boundary-leaping Israeli composer Gilad Cohen.
There will also be some intriguing arrangements of Israeli songs in the first Café Concert showing.
Other than the single-item final day, which brings the curtain down on the festival program with the Nahal Sheli (My Stream) concert at 11 a.m., the daily agenda ends in suitably more laid-back fashion with The End of Day 10:30 p.m. slots in the Pastoral Hotel lobby.
The quartet-based fixtures feature various musicians from the festival roster playing chestnuts from the chamber music repertoire. Audience members, ensconced in comfortable armchairs and sofas in the inviting lobby layout, will no doubt enhance their relaxing listening pleasure with a nightcap and possibly a nibble of something tasty.
And if you take the all-embracing, nonjudgmental view that music is just music, and don’t attach too much importance to genre pigeonholing, you should enjoy the headlining act on opening day, as celebrated pop-rock pianist-vocalist Shlomo Shaban takes the stage of the Beit Ha’am auditorium on Kibbutz Kfar Blum. His 8:30 p.m. solo date is described as “an intimate journey between his songs and the works and songs that paved his artistic road.”
Over the past three decades or so, the classically trained ivory tickler has cemented his place in the uppermost reaches of the national showbiz scene, with his singular vocals, eclectic musicianship, compelling songwriting, and tongue-in-cheek asides. Yitzhaki is surely on a winner with that one.
Veteran rock singer Nurit Galron bookends the nonclassical festival fare on October 31 (9 p.m.).
The Galron slot will be preceded by a rendition of Mozart’s Flute Quartet in D Major, after which the members of the foursome that performs the Mozart quartet will join Fradin, clarinetist Danny Ardman, and guitarist Adam Ben Amitai to back Galron, as the evergreen 75-year-old vocalist rolls out some of her yesteryear hits, including “Ani Eshtagea” and “Ze Hageshem.”
The Voice of Music Festival clearly keeps its programmatic options open, and the 2026 spread offers quality and varied sounds, as well as enlightening and fun events, all in one of the country’s most beautiful pastoral spots. Sounds delightful.
For tickets and more information:
www.kol-hamusica.org.il